We’ll definitely be doing some repainting this summer…
Paint Peeling
the boy
Elementary School Graduation
Today, our Boy finished elementary school. “I mean, I have to go three more days after that,” he explained to me the other day, “but once I get that piece of paper, I’m basically done.”
Our daughter has two more years of high school; our son starts middle school next year…
Jocassee
Darts and Baptism
May Saturday
State meet — the Girl won third in high jump, tying with three other girls.
Afterward, we had the Boy’s eleventh birthday party — it was much like the tenth, without the sleepover in the tents.
Where’d this Little Guy Go?
This Weekend
Happiness
Written as we finished up our 2022 trip to Poland last summer.
Happiness is the longing for repetition writes Milan Kudera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The Sunday sky is an almost-uniform gray with only a few spots where the cloud cover is even heavier, making patches of darker gray. Gray on gray on gray. The location of the sun is a mystery: so thick is the cloud cover that the sky’s luminance is completely uniform. Temperatures hover in the mid- to high-50s, and rain comes and goes throughout the day. There is nothing to do but sit in the house and read or watch television. Perhaps a game of cards to break the monotony.
Happiness is the longing for repetition writes Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and even this gray, cold Sunday afternoon, our last day in Jablonka during this trip to Poland, has echoes of the joy of repetition. How many Sundays when I lived here passed just like this? Looking at the sky, looking at the puddles to see if it’s still raining, not entirely sure what I’ll do if it does stop raining. The pacing from the chair to the window. The thought that even if I were in a more urban area that I might not go out anyway. So the day has a certain melancholy satisfaction in the repetition of routines I haven’t followed in years in the land so owns my heart yet is not my own.
Our trips back to Poland are all about finding that joy in repetition. How many times do we try, in some little way, to relive those years of our life in Poland while visiting here? This visit was somewhat different — a trip to the Three Crowns Mountains, a hike up Babia, bowling in Zubrzyca — but it still had the same general shape. We visit the same people (that of course is to be expected), but we also do so many of the same things. Part of it is an effort to show our kids what we love about this part of the world; part of it, I think, is a little grasp at that joyful repetition Kundera speaks of.
And so as the day turns into night and the Boy crawls into bed here one last time during this trip, I find myself both relieved and melancholy as does he. “My last night in this bed,” he says with mixture of relief and sadness. As always happens during extended stays from home, we’re both ready to head back and return to our normal routines. But endings are always hard, always a bit gray like today’s sky. We know how incredible a given experience was; we know how much we’d like to repeat it (or at least the joy); we’re not sure when or even if we’ll repeat it. I think that’s the heart of the gray shade of endings: it’s that uncertainty about the Kunderan joy.
I know well the emotions the Boy is going through: I felt them myself whenever something wonderful ended. The most wonderful thing for me then was the Feast of Tabernacles, an annual conference our sect held every fall as commanded by various passages in the Old Testament. It was not very much like the Biblical version: ours was more like a wonderful week-long vacation with seemingly endless money (the sect required a second 10% tithe of its members to pay for this week). Every year on that last night, I would lie in bed wondering if anything could be as wonderful as the week we just finished. Without even knowing it, I was searching for my own Kunderan joy of repetition and was haunted with the fear that it might never repeat – not in the same way, at least.
This is also why, I think, I’m so enamored with nostalgia: the song that brings back memories of throwing a frisbee in the heat of summer, or the bit of perfume that recalls of a long-forgotten adolescent love, or the taste of potatoes with dill that takes one back to summers in Poland. Those moments will never repeat, and in that melancholy is a certain joy, I think. It’s the longing for repetition that brings joy, after all. If the repetition comes, that’s wonderful, but it rarely does, even when coming back to Poland regularly to visit old friends and walk old paths.
The trick then, I guess, is to treat even days like today with that same approach: reliving the past, entering a kind of Kunderan happiness even in the gray reality of a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon. To relive that melancholy in a strange kind of joy, the happiness of repetition.
Sunday at Conestee
Symphony
Took the Boy to see a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony last night. He was impressed, but not overly so…
Final Soccer Game
Reading in the Hammock
Sunday Hike
Sunday
More pictures from our lovely Sunday.
Thursday Evening
More forest cleared near the soccer complex, but soccer stayed the same.
Out Front
Spring Monday
The Boy and I have been listening to Josh Clark’s The End of the World podcast, and it opens with a discussion of the Fermi Paradox, which the Boy tried to explain to his friend on the way to the pool this evening.
“See, the universe is millions of years old and…” he began when his friend cut him off: “No, it’s only a few thousand years old.”
“No,” argued the Boy. “It’s millions of years old.”
“No!” his friend insisted. “It’s only a few thousand years old. It’s in the Bible.”
At this point, I intervened: “Boys, stop arguing — talk about something else.”
On the way home, after dropping off his friend, I explained to the Boy what had happened, giving him a primer on young Earth creationism.
“But it’s science!” he insisted incredulously. “There’s evidence.”
“But they don’t accept that evidence,” I explained, and he had a hard time understanding how someone doesn’t accept evidence. I do too, truth be told. “It’s just not worth arguing about because you won’t change anyone’s mind who thinks that way.”
I went ahead and corrected his numbers while I was at it: “The Earth is, in fact, about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is somewhere in the area of 13 billion years old — much older than the couple million years you were insisting upon. I didn’t correct you then because that would have meant correcting your friend, and I’m not sure how his parents would react to that.”
My parents were young Earthers, too (at least for a while), but I’m not sure how they would have reacted to me coming home and announcing that one of my friend’s father said indirectly that I was wrong and that the Earth is in fact much older than what they taught me. I don’t imagine they would have prevented me from seeing the kid again, but if it had happened again, they might have. And certainly, very fundamentalist Christians would likely make such a move, and the Boy’s relationship with his friend is much more valuable to me than what he’s been taught about the universe.
The Boy, then, experienced something like what I experience regularly: that sense when among more literalist Christians that we view the world in a completely different way.
New Beginnings
The Boy is no longer a Cub Scout. That’s over — a whole phase of his life behind him. Tonight was his first meeting as a Boy Scout.
There was the requisite paperwork — which he filled out. “This is all you, little man,” I told him with a smile.
They started the meeting with introductions to the troop: “We’d like to invite our newest scouts to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about them.” E stepped forward, shyly as always, and said, “I’m E. I like soccer and guitar.” After introductions, the new scouts went out with some of the older boys to learn the ropes, so to speak.
So different than Cub Scouts. Boy-run, boy-planned, boy-approved. “We’re just there to make sure they do everything safely,” the scoutmaster told us when we first visited back in December.
We parents didn’t see the kids until they were done, wrapping everything up with their circle. In fact, tonight is likely the only night we’ll stay through the whole thing. “Most parents just drop them off and then pick them up later,” the assistant scoutmaster told us new parents.
“This is going to do the Boy so much good,” I told K.
Saturday Evening Downtown
We spent the evening downtown, the five of us — the two kids and the dog. It’s so rare that everyone’s schedules work out to let us do something like this. We’ll take every opportunity we have.
Our stroll eventually led us down to the river and the new Grand Bohemian hotel which is the latest highlight of the ever-developing downtown Greenville.
Eventually we made it down the the rocky area of the river just at the edge of the main downtown park, the place both of our kids loved to run about on the rocks as little kids.
“Those days are long gone” K and I constantly remind ourselves. And yet, every now and then, the stars align,
the kids are both fascinated with the same thing, and for a brief moment, we pop back a few years in the past.
First Day Out
We had our first day out on mountain bikes today. It was a beautiful spring day with temperatures in the sixties.
It had rained a bit yesterday, so the trails were a bit muddy at times, but nothing too awful.
Overall, we did 11.59km.
